Meet the Anthropologist Who Helped Start ‘Occupy Wall Street’

By Christopher Shea

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Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Frances Fox Piven have all spoken to the Occupy Wall Street gathering in New York; for followers of academia, none of those names will come as a surprise, in this context. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law luminary and former copyright specialist who has been jolted leftward by his study of the role of money in politics, supports the protests, while the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote a piece for Vanity Fair* that gave momentum to the meme of the 99% and the 1% momentum. And hundreds if not thousands of lesser-known academics have visited or taken part in protests in different cities.

Yet the single academic who has done the most to shape the nascent movement is probably one you haven’t heard of: David Graeber.

His ideas about community-driven politics emerge, in part, from his study of Betafo, a community in central Madagascar that, not by choice, was forced to become self-governing. “Betafo was ‘a place where the state picked up stakes and left,’” Graeber tells the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously”; the result was a politics of “consensus decision-making.”

After helping to get the American-based activist movement off the ground, Graeber has since backed away from it, to forestall the emergence of a leader-follower division of duties in what’s supposed to be a collectivist enterprise. He wants to avoid any suggestion of a division between an “intellectual vanguard” and the rank-and-file protesters.

Neuroanthropology has more on Graeber, including video clips of him commenting on the protests (and lots of links generally), and Ezra Klein has also interviewed him, from a more center-left-wonk perspective.

Graeber wound up at Goldsmiths, University of London, incidentally, after being denied tenure at Yale.

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The defenders of current market-capitalism would have us believe this is the way it has always been or always must be. Anthropology says no: we have seen other possibilities for human nature, long-term sustainability, and the global effects of inequality. See "Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism":